What is textual criticism

Textual criticism is the discipline of reconstructing a text's history by comparing its surviving manuscript and print witnesses. Developed primarily in the study of classical and biblical literature, it identifies copying errors, scribal interventions, editorial changes, and transmission variants — the accumulated differences that arise each time a text is transcribed, typeset, or revised.

The goal is not to produce a single "correct" text but to understand what happened to a text over time: which variants are original, which were introduced, and what each stage of transmission can tell us about the text and its history.

The Book of Mormon as a textual object

The Book of Mormon presents an unusual case for textual-critical study. No autograph exists; the text originates in dictation rather than authorial manuscript. Yet two early manuscript witnesses survive — the Original Manuscript and the Printer's Manuscript — alongside a clear chain of printed editions extending to the present. For a 19th-century religious text, this is a comparatively rich documentary record.

The dictation origin raises questions distinct from most textual-critical problems. Scribal errors in the Original Manuscript are errors of hearing rather than sight; the distinction between "original text" and "authorial text" is complicated by the nature of the translation process. These questions have made the Book of Mormon an active area of textual-critical inquiry since at least the 1980s.

The transmission chain

Each link in the following chain introduces its own class of variation:

1. Dictation — The source text, no longer directly accessible.
2. Original Manuscript (OM) — Scribal transcription of the dictation. ~28% survives.
3. Printer's Manuscript (PM) — Copied from OM by Oliver Cowdery. ~100% survives.
4. 1830 First Edition — Typeset from PM (and portions of OM). Introduces compositor variation.
5. 1837 Second Edition — ~3,000 supervised emendations, primarily grammatical.
6. Subsequent editions — 1840, 1879, 1920, 1981, 2013.

See Versions for a full description of each witness.

Categories of change

The variants between witnesses fall into several overlapping categories:

Orthographic

Spelling standardization. The dictation text contains many non-standard spellings that were normalized at the PM stage and again in print.

Grammatical and syntactic

Regularization of non-standard constructions present in the dictation — verb agreement, pronoun forms, relative clauses. The 1837 edition concentrated heavily on this category.

Semantic

Substitutions that alter meaning, whether intentionally or through scribal error. These require case-by-case analysis.

Doctrinal clarifications

A small but heavily studied set of changes, concentrated in the 1837 edition, where revisions appear to reflect developing theological understanding rather than textual correction.

Scholarly resources

• Royal Skousen, The Original Manuscript of the Book of Mormon (FARMS, 2001)
• Royal Skousen, The Printer's Manuscript of the Book of Mormon (FARMS, 2001)
• Royal Skousen, Analysis of Textual Variants of the Book of Mormon (6 vols., FARMS, 2004-2009)
• Royal Skousen, The Book of Mormon: The Earliest Text (Yale UP, 2009)
• Joseph Smith Papers Project — documentary transcriptions of the Original and Printer's Manuscripts
• Grant Hardy, Understanding the Book of Mormon (Oxford UP, 2010)

How this tool fits in

Consulting a single witness in isolation gives no view of variation. This tool places any two witnesses side-by-side at the word level, making it possible to trace specific variants across the transmission chain without consulting multiple physical volumes or switching between tabs.

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